Question Everything, Part 3: Question with a Zen Beginners Mind

How many real questions do you ask each day? Questions that you don’t know the answer to? How much do you want to know? Do you learn new things every day? Questioning is the path forward, toward evolving, toward wisdom, toward higher states of being, toward consciousness.

Asking questions requires thinking? Usually this act is spontaneous thinking. Yet when we make it conscious thinking we bring more to the table. We then think about what questions to ask. That deeper level of questioning opens up avenues of exploration leading to real gains of knowledge.

In my new year’s post, I suggested questioning everything. Assume nothing. Take nothing for granted. Do not presume to know and also do not allow blinders to cover your innate curiosity, the curiosity of a child, the freshest and most authentic curiosity there is.

Questioning requires thinking, as was noted above. Further, ruminating about the question instigates deeper thinking. Researching the question requires deeper thinking. Discoursing with others in search of answers requires more thinking. And finally, reading, a most luxurious human endeavor, requires a most profound kind of comprehensive and complex thinking.

Begin with a Zen Beginners Mind, or original mind, the mind that was there the first time you experienced a thing, and wake each morning in wonder. Also wake with awe, discarding the idea that you know anything. Take charge of your morning, do not move on automatic pilot, doing the same routine. Begin there, first thing upon waking, questioning. Why did I wake? What caused me to wake? What is this thing we call sleep? How did I sleep this night? What shall I do now? What shall I do today? What do I want from myself and others today?

Those elementary questions seem rather silly on the face of it but when you ask them with an authentic aim to be real, with an innocent desire to actually look into the questions, you find some surprising events occur.

To investigate our daily actions, occurrences, interactions, observations, and thoughts and feelings, is to enter a magical realm of intrigue and mystery. The one thing we can be one hundred percent sure of is that life remains a mystery for all of us.

That is the crux of the suggestion to question everything. We mostly walk around our days in routine monotony that has no magic involved, that is regular and consistent with our past thinking and experience, and we do not feel any mystery whatsoever. That is a loss. To not experience mystery is to have deadened our experience. To live in the mystery is to be in constant wonder and awe.

To live in the mystery of our world is to have unlimited potential to discover new ideas. To live in the mystery of our lover, our partner, our husband or wife, is to have unlimited potential to experience a new lover. To live in the mystery of our children is to have unlimited potential to learn from the closest beings to source, to God, to the cosmos, and to the wonder of a child’s mind.

Question everything, live in the mystery, and become more alive than ever.